A journalist friend of mine recently asked if his media platform, Vox Europ (which publishes multi-lingual content) could publish some of my landscape sketches to illustrate a series of 27 articles (one for each country) which they are publishing ahead of the EU elections.
This wasn't a paid gig, but since I'd already created the artworks (during my tour of the EU27 in 2019) and they were sitting on my website doing approximately nothing - so, I was happy for them to make use of the images. I know we had a session on 'valuing your work' during the low residency, and I absolutely agree that artists shouldn't agree to work for 'exposure', but since this was going to require zero effort on my side, I was happy to accept the exposure (they have 46, 000 followers on Facebook and 21, 000 on Twitter). I told them they could find all the sketches from 2019 on the 'Landscapes' page of my website - although I haven't updated the page with any of my sketches from the last 2-3 years, basically out of pure laziness.
As I had made multiple artworks (in watercolour, charcoal and ink) for each country, I didn't know which ones they would choose nor did I know when they would publish them. This morning a flurry of tweets appeared in my notifications with my brightly coloured watercolours and links to articles in English, French and German. Which, obviously, I retweeted.
I was interested to see which illustrations they had opted for in the end - not necessarily my favourites - but then, it seems like they have only chosen landscape orientation artworks, which somewhat restricts the choice. I'm looking forward to the rest of the articles being published.
I was rather humbled when the Vox Europa Twitter account retweeted me with the following caption:
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